To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate.")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

To get home (Copenhagen) from vacation (the west coast of the United States), I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles, stayed with my grandmother in LA, and then went to LAX to catch a flight to San Francisco to connect to a London/Heathrow-bound flight, all on United Airlines, before tranferring by bus to London/Stansted for an easyJet flight home, a tedious trick that can save US$1000 in airfare at the expense of a few hours on a bus.

When I checked in at LAX, the flight was already expected to be 20 minutes late, so the automatic check-in machine told me to pick up the phone, where I talked to a lady who told me that I would probably miss my connection, but that she couldn't actually do anything about it, like reschedule me, until the missed connection became reality.

Since I had dutifully arrived at the airport 2 hours in advance, I wasn't keen on sitting in a lovely LAX departure lounge waiting, and waiting some more, for a probably missed connection. I contemplated going across the airport to Southwest in case they had an immediate flight to SF that I could catch on the spot, but ultimately decided not to bother.

We landed in SF over an hour late. The London flight was a few minutes late departing, but by the time I and five Manchester skateboard pseudo-punks (they basically looked like the Partridge family with wheels) had negotiated the terminal, waited for the shuttle bus, waited for the shuttle bus to make a four-point turn to go under the airport to the adjacent terminal that we could have walked to faster if, waited for the elevator up two floors because there weren't stairs, and dashed down the international terminal to the gate, the doors were closed (though the plane was still sitting at the gate).

Next followed a fairly tedious forty minutes at the United counter, where they rescheduled me on a British Airways flight to London at 6 pm the following day. Out of Seattle. And kindly booked me on United to Seattle the following day, and provided a hotel voucher.

I questioned the logic of leaving only two hours for the connection in Seattle, but ultimately shrugged, called Fram, and spent the night in Oakland. (Not technically Oakland, because Fram has moved from one hippie grad student group house south of Berkeley to another north of Berkeley, and now lives in one of the many enclaves in the Bay area named after a city in a different state or country (e.g., Dublin, Pittsburg) whose name I can't be bothered to recall, thought it might have shared phonemes with "Atherton".

As I prepared to decamp from the United counter, I asked if I could retrieve my backpack from the checked-luggage aether. The Customer Service Agent blanched. It was subtle, and a customer who was not being as thoroughly service as I was, or who on fewer medications, might have missed it as she launched into a passive-aggressive explanation of how that might or might not be possible or a good idea. But I saw the signals. I knew it was a Bad Idea.

And since the backpack contained only dirty clothes (hallmark of a precisely planned vacation, I submit) and I had anticipated luggage misfortune by transferring all essentials (especially my toiletry bag, now overstuffed with over-the-counter cold drugs) to the carry-on book bag, I smiled and said, no problem. I don't need it tonight. I just wore my increasingly ripe Apology Shirt for two days, doing my bit for world peace.

My stay in Oakland featured slightly chilly but sparklingly sunny weather, the lovely BART system (trains every 20 minutes. My combined wait time for two trips: 36 minutes), whose motto should be, "as good as European mass transit at twice the price," tasty Tibetan food with a trio of graduate student scientists-to-be (more on the subject of scientificism in a later posting), and, as I did roughly every other day for the last week of the trip, waking up in a state similar to death because my body had not received essential chemicals (pseudoephedrine, naproxen, ibuprofen, chocolate) since the previous night.

Re-drugged and further fortified by a bagel and cream cheese, I was returned to a BART station by the trustworthy Fram and his new Prius (like the Honda Civic Hybrid but with a dashboard map display so distracting you have to click a don't-sue-Toyota-when-you-crash license every time you turn it on.).

Boarding at SF was unproblematic, if you don't count the 45-minute wait to check in - going ticketless doesn't help if they make you miss your connection and then give you a paper ticket - or the minor incident in which I left a green Time magazine nylon bag at one end of the line, so I wouldn't have to kick it forward every few seconds. By the time I though better of the idea (did I mention the chewable anti-emetic that Jon introduced to my pharmaceutical collection I introduced to my internal chemistry that morning? Apparently the sum total of three different "non-drowsy" medications may in fact be drowsiness) and went back the 50 feet to get it, they were about to call the cops.

(Fans of the literary technique known as foreshadowing may be interested to know that I did make discreet inquiries at the San Francisco counter regarding my luggage, and recieved equally discreet assurances. And that I did the same, with similar effect, at the British Airways gate counter in Seattle.)

I would also like to mention that I watched several scenes of Moulin Rouge on the plane - it's still fantastic, engrossing, and affecting even when muffled and squeezed.

Oh, and this would probably also be the place to mention that the BA 747 out of Seattle sat at the gate for an hour and forty five minutes after they closed the door because a cargo door was stuck in the cold. (It was slightly below freezing.) It seems to be that, with four hundred people waiting in the plane, they could have had the factory up the street send down a guy with some WD-40 or something. It was amusing but not surprising to see that the British configuration for a 747 has no fewer than five distinct classes of service. I identified myself as traveling in Peon class whenever asked. I don't know exactly why but I strongly resent the formal fee-based division by class in public services. I hate the idea of toll express lanes, of First Class, luxury suites at the ballpark, and so on.

Everything went smoothly in London. It only took a few minutes to report my lost backpack at the British Airways desk. I was slightly confused when the bus ticket lady said I would "have to hurry" to catch the 3 pm bus to Stansted airport, since it was 2:50 pm and the bus stop was fifty yards away, but, unencumbered by my backpack, I was able to make the distance in the allotted time.

And so, after a lovely two-hour trip through the farm belt around London, watching the truck drivers drive their trucks down the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of their cabins, I reached Stansted, London-area hub of easyJet.

Since United has no agreements with easyJet, I had had to reschedule my easyJet connection to Copenhagen at my own expense: about US$80, and it's a close call in my opinion: whether it's less painful to reschedule via a web site where I can see all of my options but have to pay, from my laptop while sitting in a comfortable chair under the watchful eye of a kitty-cat, using Fram's wireless network, or to get rescheduled for free in a forty-minute standing session at a service desk with a harried woman who plans my itinerary in a phone conversation with an unheard cohort in which my actual existence is the least critical factor in the process.

easyJet enforces a 5kg limit for cabin carry-ons, so I had to check in my green nylon bag with 11 kilos of books, pausing only to remove critical items like housekeys, the water from the water bottle (the nozzle of which pops open in an underpressurized environment, much as, to my tremendous relief, my deafeningly plugged ears painlessly did as well), and a few select chemical supplements for my wellbeing.

(For the benefit of new readers: "chemical supplements for my wellbeing" can be parsed as "chocolate")

And from that point, everything was according to plan. I was briefly concerned because I had only a few hundred pages left in my pulpy SF book for a one-hour flight and an hour or more of waiting, and I wondered if I should have snagged a backup book from the checked bag, but in the event I mostly snoozed anyway. I took a bus from the Copenhagen airport to my apartment. It didn't even start snowing in Copenhagen until the next day.

In summary: after a two-week vacation with friends and family in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego perfect in every way except for a bad cold and an excess of travel, I managed to visit Seattle and San Francisco as well. I was 30 hours late returning to Copenhagen and so missed the Monday Danish class and thus failed the Danish test (for which I studied almost daily - I have witnesses, much to their dismay), and combined with failing a test the first week and missing a test before the vacation since I was already in London, I have failed/missed enough tests that I have to retake the three-week Level 1 class. But I'm not alone: apparently enough other people failed that they are immediately scheduling a new three-week Level 1 evening class just for the repeat students, starting next week. I hope I get the same teacher.

And the backpack was delivered to the office only two days after I got home.

They're both painfully aware that Danish bands have a reputation for sucking royally, but they're both proud of putting Denmark on the musical map. They're especially touchy about Sweden, the country that has been kicking Denmark's ass in the Scandinavian-rock game since Abba. "Swedes have a lot of self-confidence," Foo says. "In Denmark, there's a lack of self-confidence. Nobody's supposed to be better than anybody else. There's a saying: 'Don't rise above the noise.' That's why every Dane who's ever successful has to leave." So who do the Danes really hate? "The Germans," Foo says. "They invaded us in the Forties, so everybody still hates them. It sucks for the Germans, but you know, they fucked up."

"The French are assholes," Wagner adds.

"Every single one of them," Foo agrees. "Except Serge Gainsbourg. And Brigitte Bardot."